I’m always assured of a good read when Richard Russo’s name is on the cover. Russo has the capacity to explore the internal musings of his blue-collar characters while advancing a complicated plot, so he gets me totally invested in his characters’ happiness. Of course, not everyone in our world ends up happy.
The Fool Trilogy
Back in 1993, Russo published Nobody’s Fool, which turned out to be the first in a series of novels all set in the decaying upstate New York town of New Bath. It helps if you read the three novels in order, but you can pick up the story anywhere along the line.
In Nobody’s Fool, set in 1984, Russo introduced Donald Sullivan, called “Sully.” At age 60, Sully has survived a number of setbacks in his rather dissolute life, but he’s buoyed by his wacky friends. (The movie adaptation of this novel starred a cantankerous Paul Newman.)
Everybody’s Fool, which came out in 2016, is set a decade after Nobody’s Fool. Russo enlarges the cast of characters and presents a flurry of incidents—sometimes hilarious and sometimes pitiable—over a two-day period.
The recently published Somebody’s Fool (2023) is the third installment. Russo moves far ahead in time, to the 2010s. Sully is dead, but his son Peter, now middle-aged, is one of the main characters. Many other folks from the previous two novels are also still around. New Bath has been annexed by the nearby Schuyler Springs, creating multiple plot threads. And, over one weekend in February, a decomposing body is found in an abandoned hotel, an estranged son returns to town, police brutality incidents are revealed, and the romantic entanglements of several couples are altered. There’s never a dull moment!
Prominent among the life lessons embedded in Somebody’s Fool is this one: when life gets tough, you have to try something. If that doesn’t work, you have to try something else. And the overall narrative theme of the novel? “How complex and multilayered even the simplest of lives [are], how they [intersect] in strange, unpredictable ways, people magically appearing at just the right moment, others turning up at the exact wrong one, often giving the impression that fate must be at work, though in all probability it was little more than chance.” (345). I loved Russo’s unconventional characters so much that I did not want this lengthy novel to end.
The Pulitzer Winner
Russo won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Empire Falls, which broke my heart two decades ago. The novel centers on Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Diner, and the other inhabitants of a dying town in Maine. Empire Falls is a must-read in the Russo canon, and there’s a star-studded television mini-series (2005) based on it.
Other Russo Offerings
I’ve reviewed a number of Richard Russo’s other writings, both fiction and nonfiction, on this blog in the past. Check out my comments on Elsewhere, That Old Cape Magic, and The Destiny Thief, and my lengthier review of Chances Are . . .
For fans of the contemporary American novel, Richard Russo is essential.